“The
Art of Storytelling: Pedro Meyer’s I Photograph to
Remember”
by Jonathan Green
Director, UCR/California Museum of Photography
Acrobat
version
In
late 1990 at the time Pedro and I had begun work on the project
which would turn into Truths and Fictions, Pedro
returned from LA to Mexico City feeling that he had not,
in his own words “dealt appropriately with the mourning of my parents
until I had completed the printing of the images I had taken” over
the last years of their lives. When he returned a month later
to LA he showed the work to Bob Stein of the Voyager Company.
Bob was already interested in producing a CD-ROM of the upcoming Truths
and Fictions project. But when he saw the photographs
Pedro brought back ”he asked me to stop what I was
doing with the other project, and dedicate myself entirely
to producing I
Photograph to Remember which he would distribute as
a small edition in homage to my parents. Of course making
a small edition at that time was in keeping with the fact
that in the entire world there were probably no more than
a few thousand CD-ROM readers, and most of them were solely
for text anyway.” |
And so
it was that I Photograph to Remember first
appeared as a tale Pedro narrated softly and tenderly as he showed
close friends a box of photographic prints. Encouraged by their response
and his own recent acquaintance with digital photography and especially
by Bob Stein’s vision of new media, Pedro, working as well with
his son Manuel Rocha, who composed the music, transferred this live
presentation to the CD-ROM, a media which was just beginning to have
an impact on the computer world. This CR-ROM became a new multimedia
benchmark: it was one of the first examples of wedding image and sound.
It became the first commercial CD-ROM with continuous audio and images.
Later in the 90s as the MacroMind Director Player format of this early
CD became increasingly unreadable by later operating systems, it was
reengineered in Shockwave and placed on Pedro’s ZoneZero web
site. Then late in the summer of 2006, sixteen years after its inception,
Pedro made I Photograph to Remember available so it could
be downloaded to a video iPod.
With this new iPod appearance the presentation
of I Photograph
to Remember comes full circle, returning to the intimate, personal
presentation I first encountered listening to Pedro telling the story
of his parents as we looked at photographs at his kitchen table.
For the video iPod is the new delicate, miniature locket, the new
talisman and family heirloom of the information age. It is the new
treasured daguerreotype or tintype case worn around the neck or tucked
into a breast pocket through whose glass and ear buds we experience
these fragile, poignant memories with the immediacy of Pedro’s
first personal presentation.
In its title and in its presentation, I Photograph to Remember, brings
together two ultimately irreconcilable yet always synthesized phenomena:
photography and memory. Imbedded in these words are the antipodes that
define all photographic production: presence and absence, perpetuity
and instantaneity, solidity and ephemerality, vitality and mortality;
life and death. Once taken, every photograph, particularly the snapshot,
is quintessentially a memory. Every snapshot memorializes and commemorates
the past. Every snapshot is a souvenir of experience. Every photograph,
as Susan Sontag once remarked, is “instantly posthumous.”
More
than this, snapshots and family portraits in particular are not only
instantly posthumous but are also instantly suspended in the anonymity
of time and space. Without written text or narration their link back
to the heft and identity of the physical world will certainly be lost.
Most snapshots like untended headstones in overgrown or ancient graveyards
slowly lose their connection to history and their status as worldly
evidence. Their subject is no longer readable, recognizable or known:
they decay and disappear without a trace.
I Photograph to Remember can
be understood as a project to arrest this inevitable decay. It is neither
a pure documentary project, nor is it in truth, as the title suggests,
a project to make photographs as an aid to memory. Rather it is a storytelling
undertaking, constructed with the aid of the photograph, that engages
on the level of a parable in order to recuperate and revitalize a set
of early snapshots and previously made photographs that were languishing,
suspended; whose presence was slowly fading from reality and identity,
hidden, as most photographs, in albums and storage boxes.
The photographic
strategy of I Photograph to Remember follows
the classic, narrative, photojournalistic tradition seen in magazine
spreads which reached their apotheosis in LIFE magazine’s
photo essays. But with some important exceptions the images in I
Photograph to Remember are far less inflected, more modest, and
less self-conscious than Pedro’s earlier documentary work, such
as the material gathered together in Espejo de Espinas (Mirror
of Thorns). Looking back from the body of significant digital
work that Pedro produced since I Photograph to Remember,
the restrained simplicity of the images in this first digital project
allowed them to conceptually bridge the analog world of Pedro’s
previous straight photography and the world of digital photography
that would follow. In the earlier work the formal compositional geometries
of the decisive moment, compelling social commentary, subtle wit, and
a hint of metaphor inform the most successful photographs. In the digital
work which follows, these compositional devices and political and social
commentary are introduced or inflected most frequently through digital
rather than discovered means.
In I Photograph to Remember the
photographs are sequenced chronologically following the timeline of
Pedro’s parent’s
illnesses and the logic of the narrative. After the stage is set with
the initial twelve snapshot frames, the photographs progress from moments
of genuine sentiment to images that record moments of loss, suffering,
pain and death. In the early stages of his parents’ illnesses
the photographs resemble innocent domestic snapshots faithfully recording
family warmth, melancholy and the fear of illness. But as the essay
progresses and his parents’ illnesses become more acute, Pedro
generates more precise, taut compositions that juxtapose spatial elements,
human correspondences, and human interactions. In these images such
as the first view of his father being medicated (17:51), the close-up
of his mother’s hands (21:20), her preparation for brain surgery
(22:22), and his father in a darkened room with a white garbed attendant
in the background (27:35) Pedro dispatches the full potential of black
and white tonality to portray heightened emotion and misfortune and
to introduce metaphors of anguish and consolation. In these images
the tension between white hospital garments and the ever encroaching
blackness leads us to the threshold between vitality and mortality.
Finally, in the photographs of each parent wrapped in the white shroud
of death (26:19 and 28:57) the quietly dramatic illumination transforms
the corpse into an iconic representation which insistently and elegantly
confronts the mystery and terror of death.
Almost all of Pedro’s 80 images are characterized by a journalistic
directness and a narrative transparency. But rather than the grand
indifference or distance often felt in journalistic work, the distinguishing
characteristic of these images is their deep sympathy and haunting
honesty. While certainly not innocent or naïve, they mirror at
an essential level the honesty of the snapshots and studio portraits
which began the journey. They resonate in their immediacy with the
poignancy of a child looking so gently and frankly at his parents’ illnesses
and deaths.
Because Pedro produced these photographs concurrently with
his experiments with digital image manipulations which would become Truths & Fictions,
it is informative to look at the expressive, panoramic image of his
father flying (9:41), which occurs early in the piece, in comparison
to the later highly manipulated images, particularly the work from
Oaxaca that makes up the second half of Truths & Fictions. In Truths & Fictions when
Pedro wanted to signify flight, the transformation from earth to air
would happen magically with the aid of Photoshop. Here in I Photograph
to Remember his father remains earthbound. Kneeling on
a chair, his arms outstretched not to the heavens but to the interior
of his home’s elegant and expansive living room, his gesture
of flying is anchored in the pain of reality and the human hope for
relief rather than in the production of myth. Being part of the world
rather than detached and manufactured in a new synthetic reality, the
gesture becomes an exquisitely felt symbol; it is both the longing
for and the impossibility of transcendence and redemption.
The photographs in I Photograph to Remember also
acquire meaning from the poetry and modulation of Pedro’s voice.
In human society storytelling is probably older and arguably more fundamental
than picture making. Oral stories were passed from generation to generation
with the music of the voice, its inflection, rhythm and modulation
becoming as much a part of the narrative as the tale itself. One has
only to look as far as contemporary religious liturgy to see how this
phenomena still operates in our own time. The visceral power of I
Photograph to Remember derives from this oral tradition.
In some respects I Photograph to Remember has
less to do with photography and more to do with liturgy, poetry, and
the expressive voice. Indeed it is possible to just listen to
Pedro’s narrative to
become mesmerized by the story. It is not necessary to experience
the actual images: the narration is strong enough to conjure up mental
images without ever seeing the photographs. The photographs, like the
notes of a score, provide the pattern and structure, phrasing and timing,
which are interpreted and brought to life through the haunting invocation
of Pedro’s speech. I Photograph to Remember is essentially
a performance monologue which holds our attention in great part because
of the music of the speech and the universal truth of the story.
It
is rare that an early work of art in any media retains its power and
durability through changes in technology and presentation. The enduring
quality of I Photograph to Remember lies not in any
single component of the piece: not the narration, the photographs,
the music, nor the sequencing. Rather its genius lies in the synthesis
of these elements through and in contrast to new technology. New media
provides the vehicle for a seamless, cinematic integration of these
components. Yet I Photograph to Remember in everyway except
for its use of cinematic continuity, is built on the transparency and
richness of the ancient oral tradition. In it Pedro is not Pedro Meyer,
the critic, commentator and theorist of culture and new technology
of ZoneZero, but rather the Baal Shem Tov, the teller of legends and
miracles.
I Photograph to Remember is not a digital
production but rather a digital utterance. It utilizes none of the
devices we have come to associate with new media, strategies that Pedro
himself will use in his later digital work: digital compositing, sampling,
remixing, interactivity. And while it now plays on the ubiquitous devices
that define our digital age, it always surprises us that such complex
instruments can achieve such directness and simplicity. When we plug
in our video iPod we are astonished not by hyper remixed reality but
by poetic grace.
Jonathan
Green
California, Fall
2006
 |
Jonathan
Green.
Is Director
of the UCR/California Museum of Photography at the University
of California, Riverside, and holds joint appointments as a professor
in the departments of Studio Art and Art History. |
to top
|
